Close To Being Right

Since the start of their continuing release late last year, a quarter of a million American diplomatic cables have been leaked to the world’s press. In recent months, coverage of their actual content seems to have dwindled; the story of Wikileaks has been vastly overshadowed by the on going soap opera that is Julian Assange.  The Australian cyber-activist, chief executive of the whistle-blowing phenomenon, has recently lost his appeal against extradition to Sweden to stand trial for allegations of rape.  It is thought that this decision will make it easier for US authorities to charge Assange with espionage, and his many supporters fear that this decision is simply a means to expose him to the full wrath of the United States government.  

While cyber attacks on Wikileaks and its online enablers have stopped, so too have to flow of cables.  When the releases began back in late November the Guardian newspaper and website devoted large swathes of their leading pages to the news on a daily basis, before it spilled over to the BBC and other outlets.  Now, however, these scandalous stories are nowhere to be seen, and Wikileaks have published barely 3% of what they have. 

The publishing of confidential political documents online is a symptom of the Internet’s growth and would have happened at some stage, with or without the involvement of Julian Assange.  Now that these online leaks are possible they’re bound to become a recurrent event, through Wikileaks or any other site that takes its place.  Instead of trying to stop the leaks at source, i.e. by correcting their reprehensible conduct, Western powers immediately opted to enter into an ultimately unwinnable game of whack-a-mole by attempting to shoot down Wikileaks and all the sites that mirrored its content.  They failed. Through their actions, the states in question have proved that they have no interest in adapting to the online new world they find themselves in.  For instance, at the time of writing private Bradley Manning has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for 280 days, in conditions Amnesty International describe as ‘”inhumane”, “repressive” and “unnecessarily severe”.  He is charged with leaking the now infamous “collateral murder” video to Wikileaks, showing journalists and Iraqi civilians being machine-gunned from an American military helicopter during the height of the insurgency.  It has been said by Micheal Moore that “he did what the defendants at the Nuremburg were told they should have done”. 

Private Manning’s case is yet to be heard by a judge, but if the charges are upheld are we expected to believe that a whistleblower is too dangerous to walk the streets?  Or even mingle with other prisoners?  It is not hard to reach the conclusion that the American government are using him to set an example, and are using fear to stop the potential Bradley Mannings of the future.  The same is true of Assange, whose status as a non-American should render him automatically exempt from US espionage laws.

Despite the many earth-shattering political changes that have taken place in various parts of the world since the establishment of Wikileaks five years ago, Assange has only become a household name within the last year.  Since then he has done many things to become the public face of his organisation, not least by putting his picture on its homepage.   He has also recently followed Sarah and Bristol Palin by seeking to trademark his name.  By choosing to make himself the public image of his website he has been able to travel the world promoting its values.  However, by allowing his persona to define Wikileaks he has inadvertently allowed the website’s many enemies to undermine it.  Revelations and controversy surrounding his personal life have also left an indelible stain on Wikileaks itself.  Because of his self-made romantic image of the lone hacker without a home taking on the world with his laptop, Wikileaks has suffered the same fate as its increasingly isolated figurehead.Ultimately the character, ideology and even the fate of Julian Assange are almost irrelevant to the bigger picture.  He can be smeared, imprisoned and silenced but the Internet cannot.  When Wikileaks came under cyber-attack, the site and its content was instantly mirrored hundreds of time, another website called OpenLeaks has been created to rival Wikileaks and only yesterday a group calling itself ‘Anonymous 99’ threatened to publish leaked emails from Bank of America.  So if Assange does find himself in a dark American military jail then as sure as anything you can bet that his place as the Internet’s ‘exposer in chief’ will quickly be snapped up by another online activist.  You can spend your life shooting foxes but as long as the bins are open they will always be there to make a mess.  We didn’t get here because Julian Assange invented Wikileaks, we got here because Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet, and in doing so inadvertently made the online leaking of classified documents inevitable.  All we can hope for is that this new age of unmasked power delivered to us by the World Wide Web forces governments and corporations everywhere to raise their standards of morality.  Because like it or not, they’re all naked now.